Police body-camera videos will let the public judge for itself when it comes to complaints against cops, and help hold bad apples accountable.

Unless, that is, the public never gets to see the footage in the first place.

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made clear Wednesday that he means to keep body-cam videos under wraps: Tapes of 911 calls aren’t released, he noted; video footage “would be under the same protection,” even for Freedom of Information requests.

He makes some fair points: “Can you imagine when I get up to five or 10,000 cops [with] three or four hours a day of video? The sheer administrative cost of trying to turn that over,” he said, would run “millions, tens of millions, of dollars.”

Public Advocate Letitia James has raised similar worries — about privacy rights, protecting innocents (e.g., in domestic-violence cases), how to store so much footage, etc.

Videos may warrant editing to protect the innocent. But blurring parts of the footage will be labor-intensive, and not cheap.

Still, some solutions are obvious. Set limits on requests for footage, for one — including charging more for large demands, as the city does with Freedom of Information requests for government documents.

And admit that technical advances keep making both digital storage and image-management cheaper by the day, so the “too expensive” argument won’t last.

Too-tight control of information fuels suspicion. We expect video footage will help exonerate officers of false charges more often than it exposes real misconduct — but that evidence won’t carry much weight if the process seems unfair.

Of course, Bratton doesn’t get the final say here. Mayor de Blasio accepted federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling that orders the NYPD to start using body cams, and to put a court-appointed monitor in charge of shaping the rules.

The monitor has a duty to address the issues Bratton raises — but Bratton’s boss has already pushed the final decision out of the commissioner’s hands.